Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming was born in Mayfair, a wealthy district of London. His father was Valentine Fleming, a British Member of Parliament and his mother was Evelyn St. Croix Rose. Fleming's elder brother Peter became a travel writer. He also had two younger brothers, Michael and Richard Fleming (1910–1977) and an illegitimate younger maternal half-sister, cellist Amaryllis Fleming. Fleming was a grandson of the Scottish financier Robert Fleming, who founded the Scottish American Investment Trust and the merchant bank Robert Fleming and Co (since 2000, part of JP Morgan Chase). Fleming was a nephew of Philip Fleming, a step-cousin of Christopher Lee, the actor, and his brother Peter married actress Celia Johnson; their daughter Lucy Fleming is also an actress. Fleming's nephews Rory and Matthew Fleming played cricket for England, and great-nephew is composer Alan Fleming-Baird.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer. Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, which are one of the best-selling series of related novels of all time having sold over 100 million copies worldwide.Fleming also wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two works of non-fiction. Fleming is reputed to have been the designer of Operation Mincemeat and Operation Goldeneye, the former of which was successfully carried out during the Second World War.
Ian Fleming, while not being a spy himself, did become familiar with the usage of the cell while studying in Naval Intelligence. The cell Fleming created is a list of contacts and other supporters in various positions ranging from the city, the Intelligence world, the world of Journalism, and in the Foreign Office. Their identities were shrouded in secrecy. It was this private cell of Fleming’s that landed him in a bit of trouble during the war as Admiral Godfrey wished to put this cell of Fleming’s to use in assisting Naval Intelligence. However, Fleming followed the code of journalists by refusing to reveal his sources by instead protecting his extensive network of friends that made up his cell.
Initially, Fleming's Bond novels were not best-sellers in North America. But when President John F. Kennedy included From Russia With Love on a list of his favourite books, sales quickly jumped. In the late 1950s, the financial success of Fleming's James Bond series allowed him to retire to Goldeneye, his estate in Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica. The name of the house and estate where he wrote his novels has many possible sources. Ian Fleming himself cited Operation Goldeneye, a plan to hinder the Nazis should the Germans enter Spain during World War II. He also cited the 1941 novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers. The location of the property may also have been a factor: Oracabessa, from the Spanish for "golden head". There is also a Spanish tomb on the property with a carving that looks like an eye on one side. It is likely that most or all of these factors played a part in the name Fleming chose for his Jamaican home. In an interview published in Playboy magazine in December 1964, Fleming states, "I had happened to be reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and I'd been involved in an operation called Goldeneye during the war: the defence of Gibraltar, supposing that the Spaniards had decided to attack it; and I was deeply involved in the planning of countermeasures which would have been taken in that event. Anyway, I called my place Goldeneye." The estate, which was a few miles away from that of Fleming's friend Noel Coward, is now the centrepiece of a resort of the same name.
